Philosophy and Media 2009 to 2012

Philosophy and Media 2009 to 2012

A series of schools exploring various issues of Philosophy and Media will take place in Kharkiv, Ukraine. A principle objective of the project is to promote innovative undergraduate teaching in the region, and to develop cutting-edge courses on media and philosophy based on an interdisciplinary approach and thus to foster a mode of scholarship that will make the scholars in the region competitive at the level of international scholarship. The project will also provide the media scholars in the region with an exciting chance to move to the forefront of the international development of a more philosophical approach to media study.

The main sessions of the project will include the following topics:

Introduction to Philosophy and Media: General Issues. The central issue of this session will be to think about the many ways in which the moving image can be understood as a form of mediation. During this session a range of theories and concepts including those of (but not limited to) Ernesto Laclau’s, Jacques Ranciere’s, Slavoj Zizek’s, Jean-Luc Nancy’s will be discussed.

The Moving Image: Epistemology, Aesthetics, Archaeology. This session will be dedicated to considering questions of medium specificity. The following questions will be discussed: How might one speak of medium-specificity in the digital age? How can one speak of historical, cultural, or even spatial specificity in media studies without doing so? What role has the rhetoric of specificity played in shaping the way we think about media? And what insight might an interrogation of this rhetoric lend to these ways of thinking—or to new ways of thinking—if specificity has formed a conceptual blind spot for media scholarship? In this phase of the project we will draw insights from a range of philosophers who write about the relationship between representation and singularity—such as Alain Badiou—but also cutting-edge media scholars such as Anna McCarthy, Grusen and Bolter, Mark Hansen, and D.N. Rodowick.

Internet and Digital Media: Philosophy of the Virtual. During this session we will focus on one of the most significant questions for the 21st century: how is human identity changed through the emergence of the Internet? We will consider the question of the Internet in light of discourses that relate questions of cosmopolitanism to the theme of virtuality—as in the work of Paolo Virno, Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Gaonkar, Brian Massumi, and many others. To what extent does the Web make for a virtual experience of cosmopolitanism? What are the social and ethical problems of this virtual immediacy? To what extent does the internet inflame national and even global conflict?

Project Organizers

Brian Price, PhD, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Oklahoma State University,
Email: brian.price@okstate.edu

Olga Blackledge, PhD, Assistant Professor, UNESCO Chair for Philosophy of Human Communication, Petro Vasylenko Kharkiv National Technical University of Agriculture
Email: olga.blackledge@gmail.com

Participants Eligibility

Disciplines: Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Communications Studies

Region/countries: Countries of NIS, and Southern and Eastern Europe (non-EU members)

Academic standing/level/prerequisites: Junior faculty

Other criteria: Knowledge of English

Application procedure

The selection will take place on the basis of the following documents:

• Statement of Purpose, including the Statement of the knowledge of English;
  
• Curriculum Vitae (outlining academic and professional history for the period of at least the last 5 years), including a list of publications relevant to the theme of the project;
  
• Short Essay or a Writing Sample on the theme of the project or a Syllabus of an academic course developed or taught by the applicant in the subject of the project (preferably in English).

Deadline for applications: September 1, 2009

Contact information for applicants and general inquiries
Contact person: Olga Blackledge
E-mail unescochairph@gmail.com

Other important information:
All expenses connected with participation in the project of participants from the region, including traveling, accommodation, food, and reading materials will be covered by the project. Participation of junior faculty not from the region is possible if they cover their travel and accommodation expenses by themselves.